[Written in April, 2020]
I'd like to share with you all some of the lightbulb moments I've had over the past six months proceeding from my readings of Carl Jung and Robert Johnson's Inner Work, which translates Jung's theories into practice. Though his theories on the unconscious are a century old, they amazingly still feel groundbreaking. And though I don't pretend to know what trends are on the horizon, I wouldn't be surprised if his ideas make a big comeback in the next few years.
For those of you not familiar with Jung (ie most people), he was a trailblazing Swiss psychiatrist active in the first half of the 20th century who created and popularized such concepts as the collective unconscious, archetypes, introversion, extraversion, and the shadow self. He was a colleague of Freud who eventually split with him once it became clear that Freud had become dogmatically attached to his theories in spite of mounting disconfirming evidence. After the split, in addition to his other foundational work, he developed Freud's concept of the ego into a much more scientific and precise formulation that remains useful to this day.
The most practically useful material that Jung has provided has been his work on the unconscious. He conceived the psyche as being composed of the conscious self (aka the ego), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious consists of the archetypes and other universal, instinctive thought-patterns that essentially all humans share. The personal unconscious, on the other had, is composed of forgotten, repressed, and subliminal memories, messages, and thoughts from an individual's past. Finally, the ego is the tiny percentage of our psyche that is present in our conscious awareness.
As I have worked through Jung's thought, I've come to realize that the unconscious has been severely neglected by the dominant culture, while the conscious self has assumed even more centrality in recent years by virtue of the popularity of mindfulness meditation. Now, first let me note that I'm a big fan and practitioner of mindfulness meditation. But what I've come to realize over the last six months is that it's not enough. If we are ever to gain a fuller understanding of our minds and resulting behaviors, we must engage with our unconscious in an intentional, substantive way.
This is where dream work and active imagination come in. Dream work may be familiar to you, but
For those of you not familiar with Jung (ie most people), he was a trailblazing Swiss psychiatrist active in the first half of the 20th century who created and popularized such concepts as the collective unconscious, archetypes, introversion, extraversion, and the shadow self. He was a colleague of Freud who eventually split with him once it became clear that Freud had become dogmatically attached to his theories in spite of mounting disconfirming evidence. After the split, in addition to his other foundational work, he developed Freud's concept of the ego into a much more scientific and precise formulation that remains useful to this day.
The most practically useful material that Jung has provided has been his work on the unconscious. He conceived the psyche as being composed of the conscious self (aka the ego), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious consists of the archetypes and other universal, instinctive thought-patterns that essentially all humans share. The personal unconscious, on the other had, is composed of forgotten, repressed, and subliminal memories, messages, and thoughts from an individual's past. Finally, the ego is the tiny percentage of our psyche that is present in our conscious awareness.
As I have worked through Jung's thought, I've come to realize that the unconscious has been severely neglected by the dominant culture, while the conscious self has assumed even more centrality in recent years by virtue of the popularity of mindfulness meditation. Now, first let me note that I'm a big fan and practitioner of mindfulness meditation. But what I've come to realize over the last six months is that it's not enough. If we are ever to gain a fuller understanding of our minds and resulting behaviors, we must engage with our unconscious in an intentional, substantive way.
This is where dream work and active imagination come in. Dream work may be familiar to you, but
the technique of active imagination probably comes as a foreign concept. Taken together, these are the two most important tools we have to uncover the feelings, memories, and ideas hidden in our unconscious, and will be the focus of parts 2 and 3 of this series. Stay tuned!
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